C.
S. Lewis: A Modest Literary Biography and Bibliography

Born in Belfast, Northern
Ireland on November 29, 1898, Clive Staples ("Jack") Lewis was reared in a
peculiarly bookish home, one in which the reality he found on the pages of
the books within his parents' extensive library seemed as tangible and meaningful
to him as anything that transpired outside their doors. As adolescents, Lewis
and his older brother, Warren, were more at home in the world of ideas and
books of the past, than with the material, technological world of the 20th
Century. When the tranquillity and sanctity of the Lewis home was shattered
beyond repair by the death of his mother when he was ten, Lewis sought refuge
in composing stories and excelling in scholastics. Soon thereafter he became
precociously oriented toward the metaphysical and ultimate questions.

The rest of his saga and
the particulars of his writing career might be seen as the melancholy search
for the security he had took granted during the peace and grace of his childhood.
By Lewis's testimony, this recovery was to be had only in the "joy" he discovered
in an adult conversion to Christianity. Long-time friend and literary executor
of the Lewis estate, Owen Barfield has suggested that there were, in fact,
three "C. S. Lewises." That is to say, during his lifetime Lewis fulfilled
three very different vocations-- and fulfilled them successfully. There was,
first, Lewis the distinguished Oxbridge literary scholar and critic; second,
Lewis, the highly acclaimed author of science fiction and children's literature;
and thirdly, Lewis, the popular writer and broadcaster of Christian apologetics.
The amazing thing, Barfield notes, is that those who may have known of Lewis
in any single role may not have known that he performed in the other two.
In a varied and comprehensive writing career, Lewis carved out a sterling
reputation as a scholar, a novelist, and a theologian for three very different
audiences.

No brief summary can thus
do justice to the many and varied works Lewis produced in his lifetime between
1919-1961. Indeed, more Lewis volumes--collection of essays, chiefly--have
appeared after his death than during his lifetime. A sampling of the range
and depth of his achievements in criticism, fiction, and apologetics might
begin, however, with the first books Lewis published, two volumes of poetry:
Spirits in Bondage, published in 1919 when Lewis was but 23, and his
long narrative poem, Dymer, published in 1926. Neither were critical
successes, convincing the classically trained Lewis that he would never become
an accomplished poet given the rise of modernism; subsequently he turned his
attention to literary history, specifically the field of medieval and renaissance
literature. Along the way, however, Lewis embraced Christianity, and in 1933,
published his first theological work, The Pilgrim's Regress, a parody
of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, that details Lewis's flight
from skepticism to faith in a lively allegory.

In 1936, Lewis published
the breakthrough work that earned him his reputation as a scholar, The
Allegory of Love, a work of high-calibre, original scholarship that revolutionized
literary understanding of the function of allegory in medieval literature,
particularly Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. Between 1939 and 1954,
Lewis continued to publish well-received works in criticism and theory, debating
E. M. W. Tillyard on the objectivity of poetry in The Personal Heresy,
published in 1939, and in that same year publishing a collection of essays
under the title Rehabilitations--a work whose title characterized much
of Lewis's work, as he attempted to bring the fading critical reputation of
authors he revered back into balance. In 1942, his A Preface to Paradise
Lost attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of John Milton, while in
1954, he offered a comprehensive overview of 16th-century British poetry and
narrative in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.

Lewis is best known, however,
for his fiction and his Christian apologetics, two disciplines complementary
to each other within his oeuvre. In 1936, Lewis completed the first book in
a science-fiction space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, that introduced
the hero, Edwin Ransom, a philologist modeled roughly on Lewis's friend, J.
R. R. Tolkien. Perelandra, a new version of Paradise Lost set
in Venus, followed in 1943, and That Hideous Strength completed the
trilogy in 1945; the latter Lewis billed as "a fairy tale for adults," treating
novelistically of the themes Lewis had developed in his critique of modern
education in The Abolition of Man, published two years earlier. Lewis's
most notable critical and commercial success, however, is certainly his seven-volume
Chronicles of Narnia, which he published in single volumes from 1950-56.
These popular children's fantasies began with the 1950 volume, The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a tale centered around Aslan the lion, a
Christ-figure who creates and rules the supernatural land of Narnia, and the
improbable adventures of four undaunted British schoolchildren who stumble
into Narnia through a clothes closet. Lewis's own favorite fictional work,
Till We Have Faces, his last imaginative work, published in 1956, is
a retelling of the Cupid/Psyche myth, but has never achieved the critical
recognition he hoped it would.

Lewis's reputation as
a winsome, articulate proponent of Christianity began with the publication
of two important theological works: The Problem of Pain, a defense
of pain--and the doctrine of hell-- as evidence of an ordered universe, published
in 1940; and The Screwtape Letters, a "interception" of a senior devil's
correspondence with a junior devil fighting with "the Enemy," Christ, over
the soul of an unsuspecting believer, published in 1942. Lewis emerged during
the war years as a religious broadcaster who became famous as "the apostle
to skeptics," in Britain and abroad, especially in the United States. His
wartime radio essays defending and explaining the Christian faith comforted
the fearful and wounded, and were eventually collected and published in America
as Mere Christianity in 1952. In the midst of this prolific output,
Lewis took time to write his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy,
published in 1955. In the two decades before his death, Lewis published more
than eight books that directly or indirectly served him in the task of apologetics
and he is arguably the most important Christian writer of the 20th Century.

A prolific and popular
author, Lewis's criticism, fiction, and religious essays stay in print, and
are continually reprinted in various bindings and new collections. Lewis's
life and work have been also the focus of countless books since his death
in 1963. Ironically, though, Lewis may eventually suffer the same fate as
other authors he himself "rehabilitated" during his scholarly career. Surfeited
by volume after volume of analysis, paraphrase, and critique, Lewis's own
canon may be dwarfed by secondary sources, an attitude he opposed all of his
life in reading others. As it stands, both his fiction and theological writings
have been endlessly and hyper-critically explored, creating a trail of footnotes
and asides long enough to camouflage the essential viewpoints and facts about
his life--thus discouraging even the most diligent student of Lewis. It must
be said that Lewis's own works remain the most reliable source and insightful
interpreter of this original thinker and personality.

I. Primary Works Written
by C. S. Lewis

NOVELS: Out of
the Silent Planet, 1938; Perelandra, 1942; That Hideous Strength,
1945; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950; Prince Caspian,
1951; The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader," 1952; The Silver Chair,
1953; The Horse and His Boy, 1954; The Magician's Nephew, 1955;
The Last Battle, 1956; Till We Have Faces, 1956.

THEOLOGY: The
Pilgrim's Regress, 1933; The Problem of Pain, 1940; The Screwtape
Letters, 1942; The Abolition of Man, 1943; The Great Divorce,
1945; Miracles, 1947; The Weight of Glory, 1949; Mere Christianity,
1952; Reflections on the Psalms, 1958; The Four Loves, 1960; The
World's Last Night, 1960; Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer,
1963; Of Other Worlds, 1966; Christian Reflections, 1967; God
in the Dock, 1971.

In the absence of a full-fledged
bio-critical study of Lewis, Kathryn Lindskoog, C. S. Lewis: Mere Christian,
1988, and Margaret Hannay, C. S. Lewis, 1981, are perhaps the two best
single volumes on the life and career of Lewis, both offering broad overviews
and provocative evaluations of each of his works. Roger L. Green and Walter
Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, 1974, though dated, and somewhat misleading,
remains the best biographical source, though William Griffin, C. S. Lewis;
A Dramatic Life, 1986, offers a unique diary-like, strictly chronological
look at Lewis's life, and James Como, ed., C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table,
1979, provides capsule impressions by Oxbridge colleagues and friends who knew
Lewis best. Paul Holmer, C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought,
1976 and Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and
the Feeling Intellect, 1974, offer insights into the intellectual influences
on Lewis and how they manifested themselves in both his theology and fiction.

Bruce L. Edwards A Rhetoric
of Reading: C. S. Lewis's Defense of Western Literacy, 1986, offers an in-depth
assessment of Lewis' literary criticism and interpretive method, while his edited
collection, The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader,
Critic, and Imaginative Writer, 1988, boasts 14 essays by prominent Lewis
scholars whose incisive analysis of Lewis's fictional and critical principles
explains how each informed the other. Thomas Howard, The Achievement of C.
S. Lewis, 1980, concentrates exclusively on Lewis's Narnian tales and the
Space Trilogy, providing evocative readings of both. Peter Schakel, Reason
and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of Till We Have Faces, 1984, presents
a convincing, masterful interpretation of Lewis's most difficult work. Kathryn
Lindksoog's The C. S. Lewis Hoax, 1988, is a provoking and disturbing
inquiry into the authenticity and integrity of some posthumously published stories
commonly attributed to Lewis. Other studies include Robert H. Smith, Patches
of Godlight: The Pattern of Thought of C. S. Lewis, 1981; Jocelyn Gibb,
Light on C. S. Lewis, 1965; and Peter Schakel, Reading with the Heart:
the Way into Narnia, 1979.